Set in an alternate version of the mid-1960s, director Matt Shakman’s Marvel Comics adaptation “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” (Disney) can fairly be called the TWA Hotel of superhero movies.
But there’s a good deal more than mere nostalgia going on in this complex, layered production. With objectionable elements kept to a minimum, moreover, the film is suitable for a broad audience.
Four years before the main action kicks off, a quartet of astronauts – husband and wife Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal) and Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), her brother Johnny (Joseph Quinn) and Reed’s best friend, Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) – undertook a much-celebrated journey into space. While there, they accidentally acquired a variety of superpowers.
Since then, as the exposition shows us, they’ve been using their new abilities to advance technology and promote peace and have thus earned the collective honorific of the title. But a new challenge confronts the team when a mysterious figure, a silver woman (Julia Garner) on a floating surfboard, hovers in the sky over Times Square and announces some very bad news.
Identifying herself as the herald of an alien being called Galactus (voice of Ralph Ineson), she proclaims that he has marked the Earth for destruction. Nothing will dissuade or stop him; the population of the planet should simply prepare for death and make the best of the time they have left.
Well, that, of course, won’t do. So Reed et al. head back into the ether to investigate.
Shakman successfully evokes the Apollo-era fascination with NASA’s rapid achievements. And, with Reed and Sue expecting their first child when the Silver Surfer puts in her first appearance, family solidarity is front and center in the story, as penned by Josh Friedman, Eric Pearson, Jeff Kaplan and Ian Springer.
In fact, one of the plot’s central conflicts involves weighing personal welfare against the public good. Although Reed misguidedly flirts with proportional ethics in the face of this dilemma and briefly entertains the possibility of achieving a positive goal by immoral means, he soon snaps out of it. As for Sue, she remains resolutely right-minded throughout.
Although impressive special effects are not wanting, there’s an understated tone to the proceedings that heightens viewer interest. The result is an unusually substantive movie, a signal example of what can be done within the genre when the primary emphasis is placed on the human rather than the meta.
The film contains stylized violence, a couple of instances each of profanity and milder swearing and at least one crude term. The OSV News classification is A-II – adults and adolescents. The Motion Picture Association rating is PG-13 – parents strongly cautioned. Some material may be inappropriate for children under 13.
